Implicit And Explicit Learning Abilities In L2 Acquisition

In the case of L1 acquisition,children vary in their rate of acquisition but all achieve full competence in their mother tongue;in the case of L2 acquisition(SLA),learners vary not only in the speed of acquisition but also in their ultimate level of achievement,with a few(most young learners)achieving native-like competence and others stopping far behind.This study intends to find the reason behind this by exploring whether children and adults differ in their implicit and explicit aptitude and whether there exists relationship between children’s and adults’ implicit and explicit aptitude and their learning performance.It is found that adults’ dominant learning ability is explicit,which results in their outperforming children in explicit learning,and children rely more on implicit learning ability,which brings their outperforming adults in implicit learning with the same amount of exposure.Implicit and explicit aptitudes have differential roles in children and adults.Neither implicit nor explicit language aptitude was found significantly correlated to children’s implicit and explicit learning performance.On the contrary,significant correlation was found between adults’ explicit language aptitude and their explicit learning performance.This study supports Bley-Vroman’s(1988,1989)Fundamental Difference Hypothesis and makes contribution to both theory and practice.That is,it provides insight into the nature of second language acquisition and calls for more implicit learning opportunities for adult learners.